IncGamers Live Stream with Diablo 3 Developer Today

Posted By: February 20, 2014

IncGamers is taking part in a live play session of Reaper of Souls with a Diablo 3 developer tonight. I’ll be playing (probably my Barb) with Blizzard developer John Yang. John is primarily responsible for the Barbarian and Demon Hunter, and he also does tuning for all classes and works on legendary items and mods.

The play session should start this afternoon around 5 Pacific time. That’s 8 US East Coast, and you can see worldwide times right here. The play session should start by 5 and run for an hour+, and you can view it and join the chat via our IncGamers Twitch TV page, or through the embed right in this post.

The design of these play sessions is for the Diablo 3 devs to interact with the fans and have some fun playing Reaper of Souls. They’re not intended as in-depth interviews, so don’t expect podcast-style conversational intensity. That said, we will be on Skype talking the whole time, and I’ve got a bunch of issues and topics I want to bring up. I’m happy to relay some questions from the community as well, so if you’ve got Reaper of Souls questions about general game issues, specific class issues about the Demon Hunter or Barbarian, or comments on legendary items and their affixes, hit them in the comments to this post and I’ll check them before the stream starts.

It should be fun and informative. It *will* be fun and informative.

Update: The show went an hour and I thought it was good. Lots of conversation from John, basically non-stop during the full hour while we ran Rifts in Torment 1 with half our attention. Issues covered included of Demon Hunter and general character balance issues, item questions and legendary power and drop rates, issues with enchanting and crafting costs, and more. You can watch it in the Twitch.tv/Incgamers archive now, and later tonight we’ll be posting the video in our YouTube channel, plus include audio-only if you just want to listen (and not see spoilers of Act 5 stuff we got in the Nephalem Rift while playing.)

During Wyatt’s play session a couple of days ago, the topic of competitive play modes came up, and Wyatt mentioned that there were internal discussions on some PvEvP ideas (e.g., teams race to clear a tower, or a weekly dungeon clear speed challenge). I think it would be cool to hear about more ideas like this, or more about any that are/were under serious consideration. Maybe John could specifically comment on his thoughts about how class balance would affect whether or not we ever see something like this, since PvE class balance issues seem to have tossed traditional PvP ideas out the window.

1. Wizard long duration buffs – any plans to give them an activation effect to make them not infinitely boring? As it stands, having a class with up to 3 possible skill slots being taken up by passive buffs and it often being the optimal decision to use all 3 of them…. not “awesome” by the standards they set with other classes.

2. Combating frustrating randomization with loss of trading – are we going to get stronger tools to home in on a specific legendary we want to find for a specific build, or you are perfectly fine with concept of players essentially never getting a chance to try out desired builds due to bad luck of never getting the requisite legendary drops, regardless of how much effort the player is willing to put into finding it?

Is Blizzard planning to expand complexity/depth of any of these; or seeking to come up with a new axis around which we can build characters? Or are they satisfied with the current format and will just add new skills/procs/stats/attributes?

I would like to know, how problematic they see that the current difficulty/reward system leads into a steep gear wall after 40 hours the latest and that people tend to speed farm either normal or t1. I would like to know whether they have any plans to adress the 40 hour gear wall that is mostly existent because of a) too much RNG in a BOA environment and b)having the complete item focus only on legendaries with no possibility to get significantly more or better loot via the difficulties (aka the 1 hour clock).
When there is only one item that counts, going with one drop per hour at best throughout all difficulties (if you can do them with reasonable speed) gets very frustrating.

Furthermore I would like to know what their vision of barb gameplay is supposed to be, because right now it seems that fury generation is very hard to come by and makes the barb very slow and clunky. It seems like you are supposed to hit 6 times with a generator to hit 1 time with a spender (6*5fury=30=1 spender). How do they want the barb to feel when he is progressing through the torments (and not when he finally has completed earthquake or oxen set)?

Unforgiving turns you into wizard. Ancient’s Fury (Call of the Ancients rune) helps a lot too. You can still swap into Mighty Weapon for bonus per hit fury. It was nerfed, but still can be helpful. Weapon Throw is probably OP.

Make sure to tell him that some guy on the internet called yovargas doesn't like it when they give the DH skills cooldowns since Discipline was pretty much designed to get rid of CDs.
(See: new CD on Evasive Fire's backflip. Booo.)

The companion skill has always had it (for some reason, despite also having a discipline cost). Still not very many though.

There are people who open the current Auction House menu to quickly scan between characters and their inventories. With the AH gone it seems this particular nice thing is going away too. Is there any plan to add a similar feature where players can scan, compare, or even change items between characters without having to enter a game? Sorry for my bad english and thank you very much.

“We’re fine with orange items that are only good because they’re orange…”

Haha, I’m 20 mins in and laughing at how fine Travis is with whatever. “Like, yeah, sure, whatever it’s fine, man, everything’s fine.” He kinda sounds like a guy who’s bored of and burnt out on thinking about this game….

Good questions, but this is going to be a 1 hour playthrough, not a development discussion. I second the question about removing cooldowns from the DH skills. Hell, all skills should only have one cost as far as I’m concerned. It’s ludicrous that a skill should cost time and resource, especially for the DH class though. Otherwise why have hatred/discipline at all? Just go resources/CDs like every other class.

Also since you’ll be running your Barb, I have no idea what build you’re running, but I found my barb to be unplayable on the PTR. I’d probably be an earful if it were me playing with the barb/DH design guy, because the barb is very unsatisfying to play right now. Maybe Avalanche makes things all better in RoS, but I somehow doubt one new skill and it’s runes save the class.

It’s so funny that some are saying that about the Barb cuz man, I only popped into the PTR for an hour or so but during that hour, I was finding my Barb way way way more fun than I had previously. Admittedly it’s just a Barb I’m leveling so I wasn’t playing endgame or anything but still…

Did it? That'd be weird since...it's been a while since I used it but what would've been the point of casting it a 2nd time? Doesn't it last forever? Pretty sure you can't have 2 at the same time so....

Some of the pets can die (still raises the question of why a cd, since it costs to resummon and it’s not that cheap, especially since early on all pets were worthless and the only companion rune anyone used then, the bat was invincible).

But seriously, when I jumped to the PTR, I was using Charge with the CD reduction rune and Revenge and with those two my Fury was just constantly full. Specially in large groups, I was able to fill up my Fury in a blink, empty it, and fill it right back up. Again, not during end game, but it was also with no special items whatsoever, just generic stuff from live while leveling, and I don’t see any reason the same tactic wouldn’t work well at later difficulties. It feels to me like there’s a ton of options for generating Fury fast. *shrug*